Pagina 17 - BCSV, XLI, 2

REFLECTIONS ON THE IDEAL ETERNAL HISTORY 17
sors, furnished the greatness of Greece in the arts both of peace and of war.
And he approves the Timaean physics, which is that of Pythagoras and holds
the world to consist of numbers [...]5
This again is a revealing passage in two ways. First, it gives an initial
idea of Vico’s conviction that a proper understanding of human nature
must be derived from a correct account of the very form of the human
mind, leading to the discovery of certain eternal truths. This is clearly
an anticipation of the metaphysics of the human mind, on which the
necessary progression of forms of states, religions, legal systems and
culture and all the aspects of society traced in the Scienza nuova
depend. This seems to connect his understanding of Plato’s meta-
physics with the implication, in the earlier reference to Tacitus, that
metaphysics must have a bearing on matters and practices in the real
world. Secondly, how this is to be understood is shown by the way in
which Plato is credited with deriving the morality of Socrates from cer-
tain eternal truths, thus implying that what might seem to be a purely
historical and contingent state of affairs can be seen as embodying a
necessary sequence, derived from the very form of the human mind.
This clearly anticipates the theory propounded in the final section of
the third Scienza nuova, stated in the aptly titled conclusion of the
work: On An Eternal Natural Commonwealth, In Each Kind Best,
Ordained By Divine Providence, in which Vico traces the necessary
sequence of states, which he claimed to have established.
II. I shall proceed now to the conception of the ideal eternal history as
it was finally presented in the Scienza nuova of 1744, where it is
described as «an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories
of all nations»6. The «universal history» of the anticipatory conception
has now been changed to «the histories of all nations». This was a con-
sequence of Vico’s rejection of a diffusion theory of culture deriving
from some common source in favour of his own theory that the culture
of each nation had its own autonomous roots, which his historical stud-
ies had led him to favour.
By this stage in his reflections, however, his views had been further
influenced by his criticisms of his «three princes of natural law»,
5 The Autobiography, p. 127.
6 Scienza nuova 1744 [hereafter Sn44], 393.